In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared War on Drugs in an effort to combat the increasing use of illegal drugs in the United States. In 1986, in response to the surge of crack cocaine that was flooding American inner cities, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which handed out harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses than for powder cocaine offenses. For sentencing purposes, they used the 100:1 rule, the law said that one gram of crack cocaine be treated as equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine. Because crack cocaine offenders tended to be black and powder cocaine offenders tended to be white, the law seemed just to target African Americans. In 1998 there were wide racial imbalances in arrests, prosecutions, sentencing and